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Up Front: Bill Keller

Through the years, The New York Times’s coverage of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican has received sharp criticism from practicing Catholics — including the past eight years that Bill Keller has been the paper’s executive editor. Yet Keller, who wrote this week’s cover review of “Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy,” by John Julius Norwich, was raised within the fold.

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Bill KellerCredit
Illustration by Tina Berning

“My parents took their faith very seriously — especially my mother, who had the fervor of a convert (from Episcopalian),” Keller recalled in an e-mail. “My brothers and I had nuns and priests as our teachers through high school, and I look back on that education with real gratitude. I’m now what my friend Dan Barry calls a ‘collapsed Catholic’ — beyond lapsed — but you never really extricate yourself from your upbringing.”

Keller, as most readers probably know, recently announced he would step down from his current position in September, though he will continue to write a regular column (it now appears in The Times Magazine). Has he observed any parallels between the institution he has led since 2003 and the one he writes about in his review?

“I run into readers who believe The Times is a place directed from on high,” Keller replied. “The truth is that our priesthood of journalists operates with great autonomy, and our congregation of readers makes up its own mind — all as it should be. In the unlikely event that the pope ever invited me for tea, we’d probably have stories to swap about the practical limits of authority. ‘Absolute monarchs’ indeed!”